Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or any other canon characters or plots. JK Rowling does. Any characters that she doesn't own are mine, though.

Prologue

The year that would be Albus Dumbledore's fifty-second year as Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry would forever be known to the Daily Prophet as the Death year. It was the only year that, at least once a week for three straight months, the page recording the deaths of the past week had more articles than the rest of the paper. The cause of such a grim record was that almost every wizard in the Dark Lord Voldemort's service died over the course of those three months. The first one to die was Peter Pettigrew, who the wizarding world had recorded as dead fourteen years before. The next was Bellatrix Lestrange. Her husband, Rodolphus, followed her two days later. Corpse after corpse found its way to a public wizarding place each morning. Every time, the body was dressed in Death Eater robes with the Dark Mark bared on its left arm. Every time, the forensic wizards could not discover the cause of death. Every time, the aurors could not find the one who inflicted death. The Daily Prophet called the Death Eaters' killer the Hunter. The tenth article, describing the tenth kill, declared "no vigilante, in either wizarding or muggle history, in fiction or fact, has ever had such a perfect record. No other tale of any other enforcer of justice has ever had such a person. Has any other hunter been such a phantom, leaving no trace of his presence, magical or physical? The answer is no, and it leads the Daily Prophet to wonder, is this Hunter even human?"

The Death Eaters, though, weren't the only notable wizarding deaths of the year. More important than any of them was the one that preceded them all, because that September, Harry James Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived, was declared dead. Unlike the criminals, however, his body was not to be found. He had been captured on the seventh of September of his fifth year at Hogwarts by Voldemort and sealed into a cave. Five days later, Dumbledore and other powerful wizards finally managed to break into the cave, but to the grief of everyone who ever knew and cared for the young wizard, he was gone. In fact, if it weren't for his wand lying in the cave, a large amount of his blood in the cave, and two hands, obviously cut off his arms a few inches above his wrists, no one would have thought that he had ever been in there. But the hands, blood, and wand were there, and wand and hands were buried in the Godric's Hollow cemetery with a headstone to declare whose they were.

Then, three and a half months after Harry's death, the Daily Prophet gleefully reported the appearance of a new body in the main street of Hogsmeade: the body of Lord Voldemort, Dark Lord and master of the Death Eaters. Unlike his followers' bodies, his was riddled with injuries, and his wand was found next to him, snapped into four pieces.

And for the first time in three and a half months, Albus Dumbledore felt hope. He knew the prophecy uttered fifteen years ago by Sybil Trelawney, and he knew that the only way Voldemort could have died was for Harry Potter, Voldemort's marked equal, to have killed him. Therefore, there was no way for the young wizard to be dead. Feeling young again, he gathered all of his copies of the last three months of Daily Prophet articles and a detailed map of Britain, and began plotting. Perhaps there was a pattern to the kills. Perhaps Harry could be found.